In Brief: ‘Golden Child’

David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child, uncompelling last season Off Broadway, makes an even poorer showing on. Revised but not for the better, it chronicles the fictionalized Hwang family’s embrace of Christianity, anticipating its emigration to America. But the telling is uninvolving and, what with both structural and linguistic shortcomings, seems to limp on bound feet. The survivors from the original cast – Julyana Soelistyo, as the eponymous superchild in both youth and old age, and Tsai Chin, as the first of the paterfamilias’s three wives – continue to shine. Of the newcomers, only John Horton, as a gung-ho British pastor, is an improvement. James Lapine’s direction can do little to wake up an essentially somnolent work.

In Brief: ‘Golden Child’